Personal StoryJames Scott and Melquea Smith
She and I were on a date in downtown Syracuse about a month ago. We were going to listen to some amateur musicians at the Funk ‘n Waffles. It was a really fun time, and we decided afterwards to take a walk through downtown. After a brief stop at Starbucks, we kept walking around downtown. It was a Sunday. The streets were fairly deserted. We were holding hands, enjoying ourselves.
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At some point, three black boys (probably high-schoolers) were walking behind us. We didn’t pay them any mind until we distinctly heard someone say, “Yo, she darker than he is.” My girlfriend and I kind of looked at each other, trying to affirm nonverbally that we’d heard exactly what we thought we’d heard. We kept walking.
Then one of them said, “What color your baby gonna come out?” We didn’t respond, didn’t even look back; we just kept walking. “Hey! I said, what color your baby gonna come out?!” By then, it was perfectly clear they were no longer talking about us but AT us. Now, we’re not strangers to racial harassment. It’s usually some white guy walking down the street in the opposite direction making a quick remark and then vanishing before we can respond. Or it’s some stationary drunk guy with a beer in his hand, leaning against a structure of some sort. Often, we’d just respond with a middle finger and that was that. Read the full story at: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/07/your-stories-of-racism/398117/ |
News
![Picture](/uploads/7/9/5/7/79575502/1785143.jpg?452)
Five people in the US city of San Francisco have ended a 17-day hunger strike calling for a police chief to be sacked from his job.
Dubbed the Frisco Five, they accuse Greg Suhr of heading a racist force following the shootings by officers of three men from ethnic minority groups.
They said their cause would be better served by "staying and fighting" than by "starving and dying".
They remain in hospital where they were admitted on Friday to be monitored.
'Justice for black and brown citizens'The five hunger strikers stopped eating in April to protest about the deaths of Mario Woods, Alex Nieto and Amilcar Lopez - all of whom had been shot dead by police.
A statement on the Hunger For Justice #Frisco5 Facebook page said that "the whole community" had asked for Sellassie Blackwell, Ilyich Sato, Edwin Lindo, Maria Cristina Gutierrez and Ike Pinkston to end their hunger strike on Saturday so they could "return to the front lines and help shape this movement and the pursuit of justice for the black and brown citizens of San Francisco".
"BBC News"
Dubbed the Frisco Five, they accuse Greg Suhr of heading a racist force following the shootings by officers of three men from ethnic minority groups.
They said their cause would be better served by "staying and fighting" than by "starving and dying".
They remain in hospital where they were admitted on Friday to be monitored.
'Justice for black and brown citizens'The five hunger strikers stopped eating in April to protest about the deaths of Mario Woods, Alex Nieto and Amilcar Lopez - all of whom had been shot dead by police.
A statement on the Hunger For Justice #Frisco5 Facebook page said that "the whole community" had asked for Sellassie Blackwell, Ilyich Sato, Edwin Lindo, Maria Cristina Gutierrez and Ike Pinkston to end their hunger strike on Saturday so they could "return to the front lines and help shape this movement and the pursuit of justice for the black and brown citizens of San Francisco".
"BBC News"
Darkness cannot drive out darkness;
only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. "Martin Luther King Jr." |
No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skins, or his background or his religion. People learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
"Nelson Mandela" |
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time.
We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. "Barack Obama" |